‘Still....’ He ached to believe that Sheila out of the fulness of her knowledge of Hypatia could help him. ‘Do you think she’s capable of liking anybody?’
‘Liking?’ The clear inadequacy of the word arrested her.
‘Liking very much, I mean, don’t you see? It’s this way: supposing you wanted....’ He waited as if for her to help him out. But she rather pointedly didn’t. ‘She seems so aloof very often, don’t you think?’
To this mild proposition Sheila assented. ‘A little cold, you think, perhaps?’ She guided his stumbling feet thus far.
‘Cold, but not,’ he hoped, ‘incapable of—well, affection, as it were.’
Sheila agreed gravely that ‘incapable’ would be too absolute a word.
‘She is very fine-looking.’ He had the air of submitting this idea for her acceptation.
‘Fine is quite the right epithet,’ Sheila assured this incredible youth. ‘She has always been fearless; you can see that in her face. And she had a sense of humour once.’ To herself she added: ‘Am I so very maternal that he must confide in me?’
After a brief transitional hovering, when he was neither quite in Sheila’s company nor definitely out of it, he went away, no doubt to treasure all these things in his heart, leaving Sheila in a state that oscillated between amusement and a half-ashamed regret. And that night Hypatia, joining her friend in the spacious bedroom that they shared, displayed unwonted animation. Whether it was Bunny or the stirring in its sleep of old friendship that loosened her tongue, Sheila patiently waited to have revealed to her.
Hypatia was in a reminiscential mood. She sat on Sheila’s bed and talked of Selborne days, of feuds with Miss Fry, of Sheila’s Aunt Hester, and of what little she knew of Kay. She appeared rather to dwell on Kay. She called up once-familiar faces from the pit of oblivion and set them again speaking forgotten parts. And presently, without preamble, she remarked: ‘There’s more in Bunny than he allows to appear, don’t you think?’